has issues

Ex-monk, ex-priest, and bender of the tenderer gender Nathan Mitchell explains why they're wrong who "claim that our postconciliar worship lacks beauty." This from the January 19, 2004, issue of America:

Liturgy is an ecstatic, even erotic act that embodies God’s own passionate, excessive self-gift by repeating it in our own time and place. Ecstatic, erotic? Yes, indeed: it is God’s own excessive generosity, that finally draws us toward those "stars" that Dante invited us to look up and see.

God is thus present among us as eros, ecstasy and excess, and God’s unconditional generosity summons our own. In liturgy, the commerce between God and us achieves almost embarrassing intensity and intimacy, for there the Holy One is revealed in breath, bone and blood, in saliva and stammering word, in songs sung off-key, in hands roughened by work and worry.

Odd, but "Eagles Wings" never affected me in quite this way. As to the discovery of eros, ecstasy and excess (not to mention saliva) in the enactment of the Novus Ordo, many of us will be thereby moved less to piety than to wearing elbow-length latex gloves at the Sign of Peace.

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Hmmmmmmmmm........"eros, ecstasy and excess"...sounds like this in the smae sentence with Sacred Liturgy is boardering on blasphemy. I think this guy's got more than a few issues. I hope he's not around small children.

Posted by: Fatimabeliever -
Jan. 13, 2004 3:42 PM ET USA

verax and Karen: Wouldn't it be something in our day if we had a Cardinal or Bishop like St. Nicholas who flaten the other Bishop for error come and do the same to those in horrendous error today?

Posted by: -
Jan. 13, 2004 11:10 AM ET USA

Sounds like a kind of narcissistic anthropomorphism. Wierd images. Poor unfortunate fellow. The pity is that this kind of person has had a lock on The Holy Mass in so many places for so long. So many bishops seem to have been coopted by the viewpoint this represents, it is hard to see how it will all end any time soon.

Posted by: -
Jan. 12, 2004 11:17 PM ET USA

Karen: You just "hit every nail squarely on its head." The ungodly, irreverent, explosions evident in hootenany "Masses" so enrage me that I'd like to organize a team of "disrupters" to invade and shout down these wild neo-Manichaeans in every church building where they put on their shows. Or, perhaps better, drive them out with whips, for "my Father's house is a house of prayer, and you have turned it into a hall for blasphemous cacophony."

Posted by: AveMaria580 -
Jan. 12, 2004 11:03 AM ET USA

The excess I can at least attest to: excess of extraordinary ministers, excess of female altar servers, excess of banal music, excess of rad femme religious designing liturgical dance, excess of the erotic and ecstatic emotionality of the fixated adolescent that results in the superficial socializing community. They are stuck there because real intimacy between persons is terrifying to adolescent emotional sensuality that salivates at the thought of narcissism disguised as self-giving.

Posted by: Stonewall -
Jan. 12, 2004 9:04 AM ET USA

Speaking of saliva, I knew that I had good reason not to drink from the common cup.